Processes of Life/Painting: 545 Times of Perturbations

Processes of Life/Painting (2016) Shinji Toya

The project explores relationship between life, new technology and painting. The website page metaphorically plants and grows structures of images allocated as thumbnails, and the page as a whole will be forming a visual pattern that grows as time passes.

The images are record of processes of an automatic collaging programme based on a life-imitating algorithm called Game of Life. This algorithm distributes pixels, and these pixels will interact each other to constitute the whole as a complex ecosystem. This ecosystem, by being perturbed by the interactions, provides a visual pattern that keeps changing in unpredictable ways.

Every time the programme is (re)activated, it automatically cuts and pastes source images (paintings) the artist created, based on the complex visual patterns generated. As the result, the collaged image constantly changes colour, texture and composition in innumerable ways, through the systematic complexity. And these images will be uploaded on the webpage to constitute visual patterns inspired by the Game of Life algorithm.

The work reinterprets the use of thumbnails as an artistic language for the painterly presentation and metaphorical growth. At the same time the space of the webpage will be reframed as a space where structures grow through performative artistic practice of painting, collaging and computer programming.

By taking advantage of potential of the infinitely expansive space of webpage, the fabric of visual pattern may grow beyond the scale of a physical exhibition space. In this way, the work also explores the web space as a space of exhibition.